Litigation

This is the time―this is my witch-hunt, my Salem song, my psalm of change. This is when I need to hurl my insecurities, my routines and my procrastination―all old, all entrenched, and all too comfortable―onto the stake of change, and burn them all.

I sat across the three of them―prophets in their business suits, my messiahs of change―and I felt the familiar bile of self-puffery rising up my throat. Sell yourself, cried my inner corporate whore. Tell them. Why you're good enough, how you desperately need the challenge and the space to grow, and what you can do for them. Tell them, sell them.

So I told them, and I might have sold them. For in that two hours I was a corporate maverick; I was an ace pilot, dodging loaded questions with grace and haste, and hightailing out of awkward moments with my self-deprecating humour. I certainly didn't mind crashing and burning, if it meant I could tumble onto another runway.

'We hope, that in one year, we'll still remember this conversation―that we both have put in our hearts into making this decision. Because if your heart doesn't sing, I don't really care what I can do with your mind.' One of the prophets―his hair white, his smile bright, and his eyes raging with the glint of business vivacity―spoke.

I gave him a winning smile. 'I'm looking forward to starting a choir, Mr. T.'

And then we all shook hands and ordered coffee, and I saw the sated look of maternal pride on WN's face: you did well, I think you got the job, was the silent message her eyes were sending.

And my feelings of excitment were crossed with the sentiment of an imminent ending; I felt like I was turning my back on an old lover, whom may no longer excites, but is still precious in his familiarity.

But this is the time, my time. I need to stretch my wings, and I'm lucky enough that a new horizon is already steadily stretching its blue over the grey of my current rut.

And so. Bon nuit.

***

Romantic love is a gangster; it swaggers into my life, extorts me, threatens me, thrashes me with its blue-black knuckles, and then it stalks away, leaving me whimpering in a corner.

I came across my own petty metaphor the other day, and it made me laugh.

***

There came a post-card, over the seas, once upon a red moon night: liebe Gina-Maria, I am far but I never left. Kisses from Croatia.

Which, by the way, contrasts starkly from the blinking blank that is my inbox.

I felt―feel?―the pang, the pain, the astringent of missing him, the other him, and I thought of May. May, with her eyes smouldering fires of cold, algid lust; May, with her red-lipped passion for casual loves and Virginia Slims. May, who despite a book-and-paper appearance, has a bank filled with the rampant bodycount of men. May, whom I seldom meet in person but often run to in thought, with my often lengthy, and frankly pointless, emails.

I thought of her and her formidable wisdom: if you love to do him, don't think; if you think you love him, you do.

'Are you always this flippant?' I asked her once. At 28 she's an inverse to the 14-year-old I first knew her to be. She kept the bangs and the polar passion in her eyes; otherwise she's a woman through and through. There is no apology to her sexuality, something I admire but distrust.

'Jean, sister―unfortunately for this world there is no golden mean to love. You can't average it, account for it, or try and make pretty little equations. You experiment and you cherish or despise the results, but hey, you don't start treating it like science.'

'The Big Bang Theory,' I'd quipped, knowing I can never match up to her libertine loves but understanding her quirks as though they were mine―and they could very well be. My logic, and her liberty. What a pair, us.

She'd laughed, but her eyes had stayed the same shade of stone. Nothing―no one, no man―had hurt her, cracked her; yet she seemed to have been cast in metal, made to singe, forged to be broken against, and never into.

So he hasn't written? Running scared. There is no sacred answer to fucking and forgetting―it's just choice.

Words that I could have written. The pain is clumsy, unnatural, transient. I allow it to hurt because like René, I seek a vehement validation through the racking burn of truth, and there is no greater truth that a love that doesn't write you back.

Kisses from a distant island then. Kisses stolen from a love that has gone sleepwalking; will you wait for me to wake?